The Ringer’s Bryan Curtis on covering media from the inside
Keynotes:
What’s it like to cover the destruction of your own industry? It’s a question that The Ringer’s Bryan Curtis has habitually posed of the reporters and creatives he welcomes as guests of his popular media and pop culture podcast, The Press Box.
“In a way, it's the biggest story at the moment: what's happening to journalism writ large,” Curtis says. “But what do we say on a weekly basis and what's the way to think about this? That's what the beat is at the moment.”
The Texas-bred, Los Angeles-based journalist has spent more than two decades working inside the industry he chronicles. Over the past several years, Curtis grew accustomed to covering media layoffs. But now, he notes, he’s more regularly covering “extinction-level events.”?
“This is the term The LA Times union used recently,” he says. “Like, it's gonna be the big one, meaning that the publication will not necessarily go out of business, but (the cuts) will change things to such a degree that it moves into an unrecognizable state.”??
Who: Bryan Curtis, Editor-at-Large, The Ringer
Resume: Curtis got his first big break when he landed an internship in 2000 at The New Republic. He segued to a full-time gig at Slate the following year. He then helped Tina Brown launch The Daily Beast in 2008 before ending up working for his current boss, Bill Simmons, at ESPN’s Grantland arm in 2012. After ESPN shuttered the site in 2015, Curtis followed Simmons to his next venture, The Ringer, which Spotify acquired for roughly $200 million in 2020.?
Only in journalism: The Press Box offers a gimlet-eyed view of the media and creative industry, with topics ranging from palace intrigue inside The New York Times to streaming, and sports media machinations, journalists covering wars and presidential races and social media narratives. Curtis curates chatty conversations with his co-hosts that are broken up by several listener-generated bits such as ‘Only in journalism’ words — such as “flinty,” “bravura,” “elegiac,” or “tasked” — Twitter moments and pun headlines.?
“It’s been something we've defined and redefined over the years,” he says. “There’s so many different things for us to talk about every week. I want to have fun when we can and the news is not tremendously gloomy. I also enjoy making fun of my journalistic colleagues. People in the industry listen, which makes me happy, but it's also a podcast for people curious about how the news works, how it's made and also just the experience of being inside of it.”
Here in his own words – lightly edited for space and clarity – Curtis takes us through how he covers the media in 2024, the creation of The Press Box and his career trajectory.?
It's funny because I hear these people who are like, ‘Oh, you know, I grew up with The New Yorker coming to the house.’ But our house did not know what The New Yorker was. We knew what Newsweek was. And maybe Time magazine. And it was a world of daily newspapers… It always felt like there was more that you wanted to know but that you just were getting a taste of everything because the media was so very generalist. It was like, ‘Here are some sports, some world news, some politics, some culture and some movies’ and to be a well-rounded person, you were expected to just dip your toe in all those things.?
As a kid, I had been the starting second baseman on the baseball team and suddenly I was no longer the starting second baseman on the baseball team. I told my mom around this time that I wanted to be a sports writer, as I was obviously not going to play for the Texas Rangers. So that seemed like the next best possible thing. That's a pretty common story for sports writers. Usually it happens a lot later, but for me by third grade, I knew. The world of magazines, newspapers and television fascinated me. It was the idea that there were these journalists, you know, dashing foreign correspondents and sports columnists, who got to have a driver's license size picture in the paper. That seemed like the coolest thing in the world.
My very first job in journalism was an internship at The New Republic magazine in Washington. At the time, I was at the University of Texas. I had literally mailed clippings to them and they called me in for an interview. I flew to Washington DC, which was very exciting. Then I had this sort of moment where I was like, ‘I'm not totally sure what The New Republic is.’ I knew it was politics and was supposed to be really good and the writing really high quality. So I went to the library in Texas and walked out with four or five issues to read on the plane to make sure I knew exactly what I was getting myself into.
When my internship was finishing up, I got hired by Slate. It was a really cool time to be there. It was run by Michael Kinsley then and he had this great idea to emulate just the five or six nut graphs you read in a great magazine profile’s intro. So it was like, ‘what if we eliminated everything but the nut graphs,’ and the piece just said, ‘here is the argument I am making and it should just run for 800 to 1000 words.’ We did that with everything: politics, sports, news and culture. It was unbelievable training as a journalist. My boss over there would say ‘there should be an idea in every paragraph.’ That's it, no padding. It was the best training you could have. It made me very disciplined, I think.?
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The internet back then was still mostly legacy media. Even the blogosphere — we're talking about in the early 2000s — was not what it would become. So Slate had this weird perch where it was like, ‘Here's a thing from the internet, but a thing that really reminds you of the things you read in old media.’ It was run by old media people. So it had a crispness and a certain level of editing to it. And it was a really great place to work.
My boss from Slate, Michael Kinsley, was also friends with Tina Brown. By then, she had this illustrious career editing The New Yorker and Vanity Fair. Michael told me she was starting an unnamed website. They asked me to come in for a brainstorming session. So I walk in and here's Tina Brown, this legend, dressed in a leather jacket, looking like an editor you would cast for a movie. Of course, I knew of her and was enthralled in a way. So we sat down and started talking about the news of the day and we had a very similar sense of humor. Our puns were the same, we spoke each other's language and after three days she revealed the site would be called The Daily Beast, which I thought was the coolest thing, coming from the novel “Scoop.” At the end of the week, Tina Brown told me that she wanted me to come and work for her.?
Launching The Daily Beast was a very interesting experience. I loved working in Tina’s orbit. It’s true, anybody in the media who launches anything is usually like, ‘I'll never do it again.’ And then you wind up launching three other things because that's how the media business works now. It was wildly entertaining and wildly interesting. One of my duties was to write a pop culture column every week called The Middlebrow. I would write columns about Larry the Cable Guy or Tom Brokaw. When Bill Simmons' first book came out, I wrote about it and that's how we met. Bill was never thinking I would work for him, he didn't even have a website yet. We just stayed in touch and we’d send each other a note a couple of times a year. Then, in 2011 when he started Grantland he gave me a call.?
Grantland was unbelievable, wild and amazing in terms of the editing and writing talent that was there. Bill had his podcast and Andy Greenwald and Chris Ryan, who is still my colleague, were doing The Watch podcast. But it was still really a writing business at that point. I was just writing features and then later I started writing about the media. Bill really liked it so I pitched some stories and that became my job there, writing big features about media people.
I had already moved to California by the time Grantland folded at the end of 2015. My wife and I had a son and she was still in the hospital as our daughter had been born the night before. I was sitting there in that glow of new fatherhood and everybody's happy and healthy, thank goodness, and I looked at my phone and there's a text from an editor at Grantland saying ‘check your email.’ The email was either telling us the site was finished or to jump on a conference call, I can’t quite recall. But either way, it was clear what was happening. I felt awful for all the people who lost their jobs. But I was also at this time in my life where it's very hard to process bad news because I had been given the ultimate good news — this little girl lying in front of me. It’s still one of the absolute strangest moments in my life.
Bill Simmons launched The Ringer the next summer, in June 2016. There was a short period of freelancing and I also took some time off... I knew I would work for Bill again. There was a time when, if you wanted to go work for one of the big publications, let's say, The New Yorker, the way they measured success was that you were able to write a New Yorker piece where you were able to fill out a template and then if you could do that, you could add a few personal flourishes on top of that. What was so bracing about going to work at Grantland and then The Ringer was that wasn't the case, you were creating the template. That part was so amazing.
How hard was it adjusting to life as a Spotify employee after they acquired The Ringer? I wouldn't use the word tumultuous because it was smooth, and remember too, this is right at the beginning of the pandemic. There was so much going on in the world at this point, too. If you look at what I've done in both audio and written form, it's been very similar, even exactly the same (since the takeover). Corporate wise, it’s been great fun and also different. But for me it's almost been exactly the same job, which is really weird in this era of media. People are hopping around a lot of jobs, things are going out of business... But I've been working largely for the same people since 2011 now, which feels like an unbelievable run.
How did we approach last year’s layoffs at Spotify? I think just being as honest about it as we can. If we make a list of companies (doing layoffs), we make sure we're being transparent about the companies on the list and things like that. It was important to not adopt this journalist voice of ‘I am the master of impartiality,’ but rather of somebody who's in it and who's seeing people you know, lose their jobs. We all look around and say, ‘Oh my gosh, my company's doing layoffs or buyouts, is it my turn?’ and you think about what would you do if you lost your job.?
We’ve become used to having to think about the publication we grew up dreaming of writing for or working for either going out of business or at least having fewer employees. Now, I think we're on to a different second level of fear, which is, ‘Is there gonna be a spot for me in journalism at all?’
What’s really tough is the sense of apathy the public has and (sometimes) a sense of confusion about what the media is and what the media's job is. It’s striking to see people like us posting on social media to support journalism and saying you need to buy a subscription to support journalism. And I think that is a very, very noble ideal… It's certainly one I share personally, but I don't think it's something that's gonna attract very many people to subscribe to our publications. People don’t look at their phone or turn on their television and think they're supporting journalism, they're thinking they're having fun, they're learning stuff, they're playing Wordle or they're listening to their podcast friends.?
The optimistic case is that a lot of us who came up with the business in the last 20 years, say, in the age of the internet, many wound up working for places that didn't exist when we were in high school. We grew up dreaming of writing for newspapers or Sports Illustrated. Working at places like The Ringer, that turned out to be a fabulous place to work at the end of the day, was not a thing. But I have to admit, I haven't heard a lot of bullishness about the news business.
We’re starting to think about election coverage. Trump and the resistance made a number of media people absolute mega stars in ways that they wouldn't have become otherwise, even if they had the exact same talent. Obviously, it's a funny election to cover because we're going to have a news- and trial-packed general election, which is something we haven't seen before. You also have two candidates that are very unpopular. The question is, how does that shape coverage? It starts out as a race that is not in any way romantic or fun. Watching the media try to deal with those things will be kind of the story of the election.
As Editor-in-Chief for Podcast Magazine?, I've acquired "insider information" about what makes podcasts profitable. Now, I use it to help professionals increase their Reach, Respect, & Revenue (??? using podcasting ???)
11 个月Sounds like a fascinating deep dive into the world of journalism!